SENTECES MEANING: GRAMMATICALLY, ACCEPTIBILY AND MEANINGFULLNESS
SENTECES MEANING: GRAMMATICALLY, ACCEPTIBILY,AND
MEANINGFULLNESS
A Paper
Presented
to Fulfill the
Requirement of the Task of semantics
CHAPTER
I
INTRODUCTION
A.
Background of Study
Meaning is at once the most obvious and most mysterious
feature of human language. More than 3,000 years of speculation by philosophers
and linguists have failed to crack the central conundrum of meaning. We will
begin by surveying some theories of meaning and their weaknesses. We will then
look at some features of meaning that any theory should explain. We end with
some examples of a linguistic approach to the study of meaning. A referential
theory of meaning accounts for our ability to point to the things that words
denote, but it has several critical shortcomings. The philosopher Frege pointed
out a critical flaw using the phrases morning star and evening star.
These phrases have the same referent, but different meanings. Using them in a
sentence makes this difference obvious.
The morning star is the morning star.
The morning star is the evening star.
The first of these sentences does not tell us anything new,
while the second sentence does. A referential theory of meaning does not
predict this difference. Frege distinguished between a word’s semantic
extension and its semantic intention. The semantic extension of a word is the
set of things the word denotes, while its semantic intention is the concept or
meaning of the word. The meaning of a word determines the things it refers to,
but For many sentences we can tell what the world would be like if the
sentences were true. We know that an ordinary situation in which a glass is
half full is identical to the situation in which the glass is half empty. The
sentences ‘The glass is half full’ and ‘The glass is half empty’ have the same truth
conditions, and so have the same meaning. A theory that can account for the
conditions under which a sentence is true could capture a great deal about the
meaning of the sentence.
Once we investigate the truth conditions for sentences, we
soon discover that the truth conditions for some sentences are anything but
straight forward. Counterfactual sentences (e.g., ‘If time travel was possible,
I’d visit my great, great grandmother.’) construct truth conditions that can only
be evaluated in some imaginary scenario–not the real world! These possible
worlds of counterfactual semantics are different from the parallel
universes of science fiction in that the possible world created by a
counterfactual sentence is as close to reality as possible given a single
change. Making this simile. There are also a great many sentences whose meaning
is largely determined by their conditions of use rather than their truth
conditions. Any question, e.g., ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ lacks a
direct connection to a set of truth conditions. One possibility is to evaluate
the truth conditions of questions in terms of the truth conditions of the
answers to the question. Another possibility is to evaluate the meaning of
questions and commands in terms of their situations o use. We ask ‘Can you pass
the salt?’ not out of concern about their recent medical history, but to obtain
the salt. Even though the sentences ‘The glass is half full’ and ‘The glass.
B. Problem Formulation
Based on background of study above, the
problem formulation are:
1.
What is sentence meaning?
2.
What is the grammatically?
3.
What is the acceptability?
4.
What is the meaningfulness?
C. The Aim of studying
The aims of study about sentence
meaning, grammatically, acceptability, and meaningfulness are we know how the
way to understand about meaning that listening get from the speaker.
CHAPTER II
DISCUSSION
A.
Sentence Meaning
Sentence
Meaning is an important component of a general account of linguistic meaning.
Studying it raises important issues about finding relevant data, about the
relationship between data and theories, about the use of intuitions as data. It
also raises questions about the notion of composition, and about the
interaction of separate components of linguistic knowledge and linguistic
theory.
Sentence
Meaning is a difficult subject which can be introduced gently, beginning with
an overall sketch of what a theory of linguistic meaning needs to account for,
namely how an initial, linguistically encoded semantic representation leads to
an overall interpretation of an utterance in context. Linguistic semantics aims
to account for what is linguistically encoded, while a pragmatic theory will
explain how more detailed interpretations are derived on the basis of semantic
representations.
Most
courses in semantics begin by concentrating on lexical meaning. Once the
semantics-pragmatics distinction has been established, students become
accustomed to exploring questions about meaning focusing mainly on words.
One
way to introduce questions about sentence meaning is to consider example
utterances which have the same propositional content but differ in
linguistically encoded meaning. This means that there must be a difference in
meaning at sentence level. An alternative is to start with a broader range of
examples and ask what are the linguistically encoded differences between them.
This leads to differentiating different types of lexical meaning, syntactic
meaning, international meaning and contextual inference. This leads to the
important notion of compositionality, the notion that the linguistic meaning of
an expression is made up from the sum of the meanings of its parts. If
compositionality is maintained, and if sentences with the same propositional
content have different meanings, then there must be linguistically encoded
meaning at sentence level which goes beyond propositional content.
The
first step in determining what kind of meaning this could be is to consider
commonsense notions, such as that interrogative syntax encodes question
meaning. It is easy to find counterexamples to this view, which leads to the
discussion of particular theoretical approaches. Most courses begin by
considering the notion of speech acts, originating in the work of.[1]
Each new approach can be interrogated by considering a range of examples. Each
course organizer can decide precisely which range of approaches to consider and
in how much detail.
Classroom
activities will focus on technical terms, starting with fundamental terms such
as sentence, utterance, proposition and definitely
including terms conventionally associated with linguistic forms, such as interrogative
and terms conventionally reserved for 'forces' or interpretations, such as question.
Alongside exercises designed to reinforce understanding of these terms, some
work will focus on discussion of reading, which can include individual or group
presentations. The core of a course will involve the use of data to test
particular approaches, which lends itself well to group problem-solving tasks.
Assessment
can cover essays and exercises, in coursework or in exam conditions, and
projects in which students collect and evaluate their own data.
There
are no introductory textbooks which look exclusively at sentence meaning, so
most courses will select reading from textbooks and research articles. The
bibliography contains a few suggestions for general introductions to semantics.
B. Grammatical
A speaker's judgment on the grammatically of a sentence called a grammatical
judgment is based on whether the sentence is produced and interpreted in
accordance with the rules and constraints of the relevant grammar. If the rules
and constraints of the particular language are followed then the sentence is
considered to be grammatical. In contrast, an ungrammatical sentence is one
that violates the rules of the given language.
Grammatical judgments are largely based on an individual’s linguistic
intuition, and it has been pointed out that humans have the ability to
understand as well as produce an infinitely large number of new sentences that
that have never seen before. This allows us to accurately judge a sentence grammatical
or ungrammatical, even if it a completely novel sentence.
The concept of grammatical is closely tied to generative grammar, which has the goal of generating all
and only the well-formed sentences in a given language.[2]
Grammatical is a feature by
its own and should not be identified by acceptability and so its acceptability
should not be identified by its meaningfulness.
Prescriptive grammars of controlled natural languages define grammatical as a matter of explicit consensus. On this view, to
consider a string as grammatical, it should conform to a set of norms. These
norms are usually based on conventional rules that form a part of a
higher/literary register for a given language. For some languages, these norms
are defined and periodically updated by an appointed body of experts whose
rulings are occasionally questioned by the frustrated members of the public.
a. Criteria that determine grammatical
1.
A speaker's linguistic competence, which is the knowledge that they have of their language, allows them to
easily judge whether a sentence is grammatical or ungrammatical based on intuitive introspection.
For this reason, such judgments are sometimes called introspective grammatical judgments.
2.
The context in which the sentence was uttered.
b. Criteria that don't determine grammatical
In his study of grammatical, Chomsky identified
three criteria which cannot be used to determine whether or not a sentence is
grammatical
2.
Whether or not the sentence is
meaningful
3.
Whether or not the sentence is
statistically probable
To illustrate this point, Chomsky
created the nonsensical sentence in (1), which does not occur in any corpus, is
not meaningful, and is not statistically probable. However, the form of this
sentence is judged to be grammatical by many native speakers of English. Such
grammatical judgments reflect the fact that the structure of sentence (1)
obeys the rules of English grammar. This can be seen by compering sentence (1)
with sentence (2). Both sentences have the same structure, and both are
grammatically well-formed.
Tree structure of "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"
1.
Colorless
green ideas sleep furiously.
2.
Harmless
young children sleep quietly.
A grammatical string is not necessarily meaningful, as exemplified by
Chomsky’s famous sentence ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’. However,
language speakers can still understand nonsensical string by natural intonation
and that speakers are able to recall them more easily than ungrammatical
sentences. It is also suggested that speakers are supposed to have intuitions
about grammatical, which is determined by their competence on that language.
C. Acceptability
Names are important for what you call
something can affect how people understand it, no matter how many times you
clarify your intentions. Chomsky has been the unfortunate recipient of
considerable “criticism” launched against positions that he does not hold. I
have discussed this elsewhere but it is worth reiterating for when it comes to
criticizing his ideas, it appears, that understanding them is hardly a
prerequisite. The most insistent zombie criticism comes in frantic
popular pieces that regularly announce that Universal Grammar has failed
because language X doesn’t have property Y (Piraha and recursion fit this
template to a T). The fact that Chomsky’s conception of Universal Grammar is
not about languages but about the Faculty of Language (viz. humans have a
species specific capacity to acquire languages and Universal Grammar is a
specification of the mental powers on which this capacity supervenes) and that
it does not require that every language exhibit the same properties seems
irrelevant to these critics and the secondary market in Chomsky criticism (you
know who you are!). However, satisfying it is to reiterate this simple
but important point (and please feel free to join me in making it at every
available opportunity (Tip: it makes a nice part of any wedding or bar mitzvah
speech)) let me leave it aside for now and let me instead continue my program
of ling-speak reform. In earlier posts, I (and Paul) suggested
that we drop ‘learning’ for the more generic ‘acquisition’ in describing what
kids do and reserve the former term for a particular kind of data driven
acquisition.[4]
However, there
are still modern linguists who side with the more traditional categorical
interpretation of grammatical.[5]
Speakers' judgments of the well-formlessness of sentences form a continuous
spectrum. While many grammatical judgments are categorical with a given
sentence judged as either 'grammatical' or 'ungrammatical' there are a large
number of sentences that fall in a grey area of partial acceptability.
According to Jon Spouses the difference between grammatical and
acceptability is just that: grammatical knowledge is categorical, whereas acceptability
is a gradient scale. The acceptability of a sentence is often reported in a variety of terms
including acceptable, marginally acceptable, unacceptable, terrible, good etc.[6]
Some linguists believe that the informal use of these diacritics is problematic because the exact meanings of these symbols have never been
properly defined and their usage is riddled with inconsistencies.
So acceptability is a
predicate of our linguistic data. At bottom, a big part of that data is
judgments of the acceptability of an utterance of a sentence in a specified
context (e.g. we ask “could you say BLAH BLAH BLAH in context C to express
M?”). Often, a used sentence token can be judged unacceptable without much
specification of context of use (e.g. island violations), but often not (e.g.
scope ambiguities). Thus, low acceptability can be traced to a variety of
reasons, only one of which concerns the utterance’s grammatical status. Indeed,
all the four possible relations between +/- acceptability (+/-A) and +/-
Grammatical (+/-G) exist.
D. Meaningfulness
Meaningfulness considers how
well-formed that sentence is semantically. These three concepts are interrelated
to one another. In the text given, we want to clarify these three aspects in
the two sentences:“Slow and steady wins the race”, and“Fast and consistent will
always beat the slow and steady.” 1. Grammatical Firstly, in fact, these
sentences don’t follow grammatical rules, and are both considered ungrammatical.
The adjectives “slow”, “steady”, “fast”, “consistent”should be turned into
nouns and the verb “win” should be used in its bare infinitive form to make the
sentences grammatical. 2. Acceptability Secondly, in term of “acceptability”,
the two sentences are unacceptable because the verbs “beat” and “win” don’t go
with either “slow and steady” or “fast and consistent”. These verbs should be
used for people only. 3. Meaningfulness About “meaningfulness”, it is said that
sometimes grammatical sentences are not necessarily meaningful or acceptable.
Even some sentences though fully grammatical and perhaps also meaningful are,
for various reasons, unacceptable.In this case, although the two sentences are
ungrammatical and unacceptable, they are both meaningful. “Slow and steady wins
the race” means that consistency.[7]
So meaningfulness is the Sentences are grammatically well-formed. However, they are either
meaningful or meaningless. Utterances can be ungrammatical , yet , they are
meaningful.
CHAPTER
III
CONCLUSION
Conclusion material about is Sentence Meaning is an
important component of a general account of linguistic meaning. Studying it
raises important issues about finding relevant data, about the relationship
between data and theories, about the use of intuitions as data. It also raises
questions about the notion of compositionality, and about the interaction of
separate components of linguistic knowledge and linguistic theory, in the sentence
meaning include first grammatically, Acceptability, and meaningfulness.
Grammatical is a feature by
its own and should not be identified by acceptability and so its acceptability
should not be identified by its meaningfulness. The
acceptability of a sentence is often reported in a variety of terms including
acceptable, marginally acceptable, unacceptable, terrible, good etc. So acceptability is
a predicate of our linguistic data. At bottom, a big part of that data is
judgments of the acceptability of an utterance of a sentence in a specified
context. Meaningfulness is the Sentences are
grammatically well-formed. However, they are either meaningful or meaningless.
Utterances can be ungrammatical , yet , they are meaningful.
[1] J.L. Austin.,
M. Sbisa, & J.O.Urmson,How To Do Things With Words, 2nd edition,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press,1976)p.112
[2] Hopper, Paul (1987): Emergent grammar. In: Aske, Jon et al.
(ed.) (1987): General session and
parasession on grammar and cognition. Proceedings of the thirteenth annual
meeting. Berkeley: BLS: 139–155.
[3] Chomsky, Syntactic
Structures, (The Hague/Paris:Mouton,1957)p.1
[4] http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2013/02/acceptability-and-grammaticality.html
(Tuesday, 9 Dec 2014. 4:30pm)
[5] John Lyons,Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics,( London: Cambridge
University Press:1968)p.137
Comments
Post a Comment